They mentioned allowing UI mods in their original announcment I think but no idea if they are sticking with it.
Looks pretty and i'm a huge fan of having a nice character to look at but the gameplay needs to not suck. Theyd have to have archer be more fun to play in FFXIV than corsair+ranger is in XI, I don't really see that happening.
Apparently in ARR ranged attackers are going to switch to punching with their fists if something closes to melee range, thats awful if soloing lol.....
some abilities are no argument you NEED to set this. Some abilities it would benefeit you to set them but they are not needed.
for instance Invigorate is a MUST HAVE for any job that gets it from a sub class.
However, DRG gets things like Blinside which while awesome for damage if you know in the event youll be behind the mob 100% of the time youd be better off setting it but if your in an event with lots of hate resets or you can easily rip off the tank (for whatever reason) you might aswell not set it.
There are the cookie cutter skill builds out there (most of it coming from the 1337 FFXI people that like to do all the math and stuff to make "optimal" stuff) but you dont necessarily need this one setup to do this one thing because thats the only thing ever that you are ever going to have the best ever with.
It's actually pritty limited what you would be setting from your sub class abilites as a job. You can't combo the weapon skills making almost all of them a waste of tp (leg sweep if you need a weak AoE for somereason on mnk is all that comes to mind) which puts you at abilites instead. Drg for example I normally go Second wind (self heal) and Blindside (to force a crit on Doom Spike) from pug, Chameleon and Quelling Strike from arc for enmity management. This leaves 1 slot left for either Feather Foot or Decoy which both serve the same puropose of avoiding damage from an AoE and are the only 2 abilities left. The only real room to wiggle would be if you had a tank that let you drop Chameleon to have both Feather Foot and Decoy or if there was enough healing going around to drop second wind.
Classes don't get much use in parties but are usefull for solo/low man because you can pull abilites from all classes so there is alot more variety. For example if you are solo you would want your buffs set along with cure and second wind where as low man only one person really needs to set those so you will be adjusting fairly often depending on the situation.
It's more SEs way of encouraging you to play with all the classes atleast a bit since most of the abilites are gained at low levels. All that said going into ARR only the alpha testers have any idea what it will be like so far.
Gotta say, I'm loving the look of the new character creation system, it looks very detailed, there seems to be so much you can customize this time around.
The voice options this time also seem to be more varied, there's about 12 voices per race I think.
I'm releived that they did options from a list again rather than sliders... I know sliders give alot more freedom but I always seem to find something messed up with their face that didn't really show in the CCs lighting. Not a big deal in single player games but if I'm gunna be looking at the character for years possibly it would bug me XD